


Steatoda

by spiderstanspiderstan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5+1, Avengers Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov-centric, Psychological Recovery, concrit wanted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-25 02:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12026205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderstanspiderstan/pseuds/spiderstanspiderstan
Summary: "She hurt, everywhere, and she was trying to determine how much to acknowledge it. "Natasha Romanoff and pain are old friends.





	Steatoda

 

The soldier cupped the tiny heel of the girl before him. She was the fourth, and he was working fast, lest the first few dancers bleed through their shoes. He dug the tip of the dagger into the ball of her foot, using his flesh hand, so he could gauge resistance. Unlike the others, she didn’t flinch, but the ends of her red ringlets trembled as a shiver ran through her tiny body.

“Are you in pain?” The dagger bit along the sole of her foot, beneath her perfect, tiny toes.

The girl shook her head. Smiled, almost convincingly, showing gaps in the pearly bottom row of milk teeth, and held her soft chin high.

“I am not weak, Soldier.”

She said it like a name. In a way that was punishable.

The blade crossed the alabaster arch of her foot, angling from below her smallest toe to the opposite side of her heel. Her toes twitched, if only slightly. A reaction.

The blade dug deeper as he slowly completed the figure-eight.

She had no scars. It was her first time doing this. And yet, she laced up her shoes with a completely blank face, her only move to roll her eyes at the next young dancer, who failed to be so stoic.

The soldier did not feel in the way these still-soft girls did.

If he had the capability, he would have been greatly impressed.

* * *

Phil was really starting to wonder where they found these people.

The woman—Natasha, Natalia, the (a?) Black Widow—was watching him with venomous, cloaked distrust from across the hall. She’d matched, then exceeded his brisk pace, despite the ribs he’d seen and heard her break the day before. Things had been going well. Then he’d mentioned medical and now they were in a standoff.

Clint had brought her in, because Clint had a thing for feral strays. Clint had _been_ a feral stray at one point. He liked to pay it forwards.

“You’ve trusted us this far,” Phil said. “What’s wrong?”

She responded with a slight shift in body language. To the untrained eye, she would have been suddenly and immensely more threatening. It carried words, almost- _you know why_.

Phil rearranged his worldview momentarily, and stepped into her shoes.

“We need you functional,” he said. “We want peak physical performance, into the long term. And we won’t get that if you don’t let us fix you.”

“I _am_ functional,” Natasha spat it, almost, her tone light but the words barbed. “If this is what sends your people to medical, I don’t want to be involved with you. I don’t want to spend my time babysitting.”

They don’t know much about the Red Room, but they know enough.

“This is standard procedure,” Phil said. “Look, you’re not a special case. Everybody gets a medical eval when they arrive.”

Really, it was a miracle she’d cooperated up until this point. Her eyes were hard and wild, like those of a wolf. A lifetime of effort was spent convincing her she wasn't human, and it showed.

“What do you do to the failures?”

There was a new edge to her voice; not fear, exactly. Something like curiosity.  

Phil heard stories. Urban legends, unsubstantiated, or that was how they’d seemed, until now. Guns pressed through downy hair. Little bodies, dissolved in hot lye.

Looking non-threatening would've been seen as a threat, so Phil didn’t attempt it. He did, for her benefit, smile.

“We treat them.”

A slight tension around her eyes. Like everything else, impossibly subtle.

“No,” she said. “I’ll heal.”

“If that’s what you want.” Phil said, because trust had come at steeper prices.

Maybe Clint would rub off on her, with time.

* * *

Clint had never realised something so powerful could be so…

‘Fragile’ wasn’t the right word.

“Your ankle,” he said.

Beside him, Natasha—the name she used now—froze. She smirked, an expression few would be trusted with.

“If you think it’s just my ankle…” She shook her head, as if to bring herself out of a daze.

It was a dance with her, even now, when she was trusted on missions. Right now the assassin she was trained to be shone through; she was every bit sharp angles and the crunch of broken bones.

She was harsher when she was hurt.

“Are you sure you should be walking on that?” Clint asked. The trust between them was delicate as sugar-glass. It was a matter of avoiding pushing buttons, but nobody knew where the buttons were. Every move, every word, was a shot in the dark.

Natasha looked at him, red curls falling into her eyes, and allowed the slightest crack in her shell. There was

something frightened, almost, glinting in those empty eyes of hers. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Clint was getting used to her, now, after months. He could just see the tension creeping into her body; the threat of strength, unrecognisable body language that nobody else was able to speak. The twitch in the lips before a wolf bared its fangs; the poised tail before a snake began to rattle.

She didn’t stop walking, though. Didn’t even shift her gait. Clint could hear it, with every silent step: a grinding crunch, distantly reminiscent of the sound when a pepper mill was twisted. How many bones, how many shards to make that noise?

“Here,” Clint said, stating the obvious. “We tend not to let injuries go untreated.”  

Another minute shift in posture. One step closer to striking.

“I’m not _broken_.” There was a teasing edge to it, accusatorily light and lilting. Calling him, in a few words and a few notes, ridiculous. “It’s not hindering me.” Then, tacked on to please him, with just a little too much of a break between words- “I’ll fix it when I have time.”

Like everything with her, it felt like a trap.   

She’d gone into the Red Room with a group of twenty-eight.

By the time she'd left, there were four.

“I'm not being euphemistic,”  Clint said. “We have qualified medical staff. You’ve seen them. You can get treatment for… that.”

Natasha shrugged, a gesture she’d picked up from the other agents on site. Clint wanted to believe they were starting to rub off on her, and she hadn’t practiced the motion.

“If it matters that much to you, I can fix it.”

Later, the twisted frame of wire emerging from her flesh-an Ilizarov device, assembled by hand from god knows what- would repulse and terrify others, but Clint recognised it for what it was: an obvious, announced, compromise.

* * *

“What do we do if he dies?”  

Romanoff was looking up at Fury, an odd gesture from her.  Eye contact meant she wanted something, like the whiny little voice a kid would use to make their parents feel sorry for them.

“Stark?” he asked. “Put together a decent story, and be glad he already gave all his shit away.”

“At least we won’t have to worry about a will,” Natasha snarked, taking a bite of the donut she’d bought. Chocolate frosting stuck to her lipstick.

There was more there. Despite being a big girl who was figuratively and literally armed to the teeth, Romanoff didn’t like using her words. She didn’t like admitting she needed to.

“For a genius,” Fury said, pausing to sip his crappy donut-store coffee. “He’s pretty damn stupid.”

Natasha nodded, slowly, chewing her donut.

“He’s… tenacious,” she said. “You can’t deny him that.”

“He’s a damn inconvenience, is what he is,” Fury said. “You can’t tell me that you enjoyed coming all the way out here to stab him in the neck.”

Romanoff grinned, as if to suggest that she did.

“It’s a pain in the ass to lose an asset to their own stupidity,” Fury said. “Especially the smart ones.”

Romanoff squinted at something in the distance, breaking that earnest eye contact.

She was a very different kind of pain in the ass. Stark was a loose canon, Romanoff had rigid, ill-informed internal logic, and at least enough sense to keep poisonous metals out of her body cavities. But she was drawing the lines; both of them knew it. She wouldn’t have laid out these dots if she didn’t want him to connect them.

“I admire it.” A pause, and then another bite of donut. “Within reason. This is… not within reason.”

“I don’t,” Fury said, slowly getting more direct. “It’s not a good trait. He’s barely worth the resource cost of babysitting.”

Romanoff considered that for a brief moment.

“It’s a martyr complex,” she decided, quietly. “Or something similar.”

“It’s self-flagellation.” Fury let the line between the conversation they were having and the one they were pretending to have blur even further, testing for a response. “And habit. He’s never cared about wrecking his body.”

“There’s a point where endurance gets...stupid.”  Romanoff tipped her head back, and somehow communicated firm finality by downing her coffee. “What next?”

* * *

 

Bruce had discovered something about his teammates.

Because he had _worked as a doctor_ , a lot of them preferred him to actual doctors.

It was four-fifteen in the morning. Black Widow was standing beside his formerly-locked window, blood dripping from  her right hand.

“Hi,” she said.

Bruce took his glasses from the nightstand.

“What’s up?” he asked. Natasha was, historically, a terrible patient, but he didn’t want her bleeding out.

“Nothing bad.” It was a hasty reassurance, but sounded honest. “High-speed fight, slippery roads, motorcycles…”

She waved her dripping hand, with an ease that indicated minor injuries.

“I could use a hand with the clean-up,” she said. “That’s all.”

Bruce moved quickly, because anything else would be seen as rejection, and this was the thinnest ice conceivable. Vulnerability, from her, was something impossibly rare.

Natasha was experiencing what someone with a better sense of humor would call _death by a thousand papercuts_. Road rash, gritting from the small of her back to her shoulder blades, across an arm and a thigh. A few minor lacerations, and the worst part; two dislocated fingers.

Quick triage told him that none of it would kill her, because Natasha had her shit together and unlike most of the others, understood direct pressure as a concept. He slid his first aid kit, the behemoth of a thing, out from under his bed and got to work.

“Sorry about your shirt,” the words broke the silence as Bruce snipped the damp cloth away. He’d soaked it in saline, to break apart the layer of coagulated blood holding it to her back. They both knew this, but talking was always good. He was trying to forget her utter lack of expression as he’d reduced her now-splinted fingers.

He trusted her more than he trusted radiographs.

Natasha, who was sitting in the bathtub, (she’d insisted, to avoid making a mess) shrugged.

“I ruined it first.”

Bruce flushed the majority of the grit out of her wounds with more saline, thanking the heavens for the practicality of squirt-bottles. Without the mess of cloth, dirt and blood, he could see more of the damage: gravel, ground in from friction and impact, as deep as the yellow of subcutaneous fat. A few unfortunate shreds of her shirt, scrambled into the skin.

He attended to the lacerations first. None too deep, most with the jolting shape that came from the a target jerking away halfway through a cut. Sutures were simple. When he was done, he moved onto the rest, taking sterile tweezers between his gloved fingers.

Natasha was making distant eye contact with a soap dish. She had a particularly empty expression, an artifact from a time when that was model behaviour. It was as much a scar as the rest. Arcing white lines that had once been lacerations; the blotches of bullet wounds where she’d been shot through. And moments like this. Where she seemed a little less present. A little less human; more what they’d wanted her to be.

“This is going to hurt,” Bruce said. There was no sudden jolt of motion, but the shaky thumbs-up Nat gave over her shoulder assured him that she’d snapped out of it.

“It’s what I get for mis-timing my landing.”

It was spoken like a joke. Maybe Bruce just read too much into it. Maybe seeing the raw flesh between her shoulder blades made her seem more vulnerable. For once, she didn’t seem to be in absolute control.

Maybe he just knew too much of her history.

“When I first…” Bruce searched for an appropriate word, and didn't find one, “ _transformed_ , it hurt. It was the most painful thing I'd ever been through.”

He grasped a shard of gravel with the tweezers. Tried to make it as painless as possible.

The first of many fragments pinged into the bowl they were using to collect them.

“It felt like karma,” he continued. “for playing god.”

Natasha was silent for a moment. Too still, like a statue. Against the red of her hair and  blood, her skin looked like carved chalk, bleached and breakable.

“Did it ever stop?”

“Being painful?”

Another piece of gravel. A trickle of blood.

“Feeling like karma.”

“Eventually.” Really, it hadn't, not quite. The episodes of that feeling were few and far between, but still extant. “After a while I…”

 _Started sounding like my father_ , he didn't say.

“Realised how damaging that was,” he continued, “and started compensating for it. With prompt medical attention. And snacks.”

Natasha was holding her hair forward, her slim fingers buried in the curls. As Bruce removed another, deeper piece of gravel, the kind that would be more of problem if he left it in, her fingers curled.

“Don’t you feel selfish?” she mumbled it, in the tone of a confession, as if the questions should be followed by hail Marys and respite. “Prioritizing like that?”

“Why would I?” Bruce asked. Nat was setting the pace and tone of the conversation, leading completely, and it still felt like dancing on a knife-edge; as if she were primed to snap shut, like a bear trap.

“Time and resources,”  Natasha said. Her voice was a low, hard, thing. Her knuckles were bone-white in her fiery curls. “That wouldn't be consumed by someone stronger.”  

More gravel, deeper still. Enough that, in anyone else, everything could have been blamed on pain.

“No.” It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. Natasha could probably hear the half-truth in it. “Not at all.”  

* * *

In the middle of Staten Island, a fight was dying out.

Natasha was one with the motion of the battle, running on the buoyancy of adrenaline and muscle memory. She ducked between two alien soldiers, stabbing the area identified as analogous to their hearts—

And heard a child scream.

This was not part of the distant cacophony of civilians; the sound was high and clear in her ears, and, for a fraction of a second, froze her. Took her back.

It wouldn't have stung so much if the source was younger, six or seven or eight, but the ambiguous pitch was backed by the vibrato of larger lungs. Old enough that on hearing it, Natasha waited not for the sound of a slap and biting words, but the call for everyone to watch, the whip-crack of a switch on skin.

She didn’t stop moving, but she remembered, in the muddled flashes of a procedure she’d watched a hundred times. Pale, small feet, toes brushing damp concrete as if they were en pointe, rather than suspended by their wrists; bloodied water running down soft, slim, half-grown bodies. The sputtering gasps as drenched hair- brown, blonde, black, _never_ red- draped over their faces.

The buzzing symphony of speech in her comms was shattered by another shriek. It lacked the hope of fear or shock. This was agony, a crescendo from choking breaths, a sound torn from its maker.

The crash of iced water- smelling still of the lake outside, of the fresh memory of snow- muffled by the single ceiling between them. One of the girls had cried through the night, giving up, and been all over bloodied shreds when they found her, limp but breathing, in the morning.

When the sobbing started, she recognised the voice.

“I’m...” a heaving breath, in the silence left by everyone else, his voice small and broken, “I’m fine.”

Her first response was  resentment; a blooming, aimless thing, distant from the speed of her limbs and the rush of her breath. She resented Spider-Man for making this a rescue mission with his naked, infantile weakness, Stark for bringing him in the first place, herself for even thinking it, for letting her past be regurgitated into the present.

The smell of blood and ice, overlapping the burning-chemical-concrete stink of a battle in the city.  

“You are _not_ fine,” Stark told him, harsh enough to cut halfway through the anxiety.

It was one misstep, one stupid motion that carried through on the force of her attacker; a basic, beginner’s mistake. A consequence of letting herself be so rattled. Very abruptly, she lost the choice of walking. Shifted her weight to her remaining functional leg and ignored the pain blooming from her swelling knee. She didn’t have time for it.

At least, not yet.

“Nat,” Stark again, buzzing in her ears and making her want to rip the goddamn comms out. “You up for some babysitting?”

She caught herself balanced on the cliff-edge of a reply, because last she saw Stark, he was swooping to a spot far enough away that lurching there would do more damage.

Saying _no_ was more of a fight than the battle had been.

Back in the present, with the ashes of a battlefield on her tongue and the inability to bring air into her lungs, Natasha tried to ground herself. It had been decades on decades— she’d coped up until this point.

This was far below the standard she’d been trained to, by any organisation. Far below the standards she’d set herself.

Finally, air, as her breathing and heart rate slowed. Pain, as the adrenaline faded. She squinted at the horizon, where, through the fog of dust and smoke, she could see the red smudge of an approaching figure.

“Hi,” Spider-Man waved, with one hand. The squared-off jut of his other shoulder, and the way his voice wavered as he said it, showed that it was dislocated. “Um, I, I came to check if you were okay?”  

“You scream like a little girl.” Natasha braced against the corpse of an alien, and felt the immediate need to compensate. Her heart thrummed. “Want me to…”

She gestured to his shoulder.

Her kneecap was dislocated; the pain was familiar, hot and twisting.

“D-do I want you to… what?” Pain and embarrassment coloured his voice, bled into his body language.

“Fix your shoulder,” Natasha said. “Why aren’t you with Tony?”

A one-shouldered shrug. A sudden tension, even more discomfort than he was already in. Natasha began to rock back to a centred position, to balance her weight evenly, despite the injury, demonstrate the inverse of his fragility, and stopped. Now was not the time for habit.

“What happened?” her voice was soft, low, the tone she used for wounded animals. Wounded weapons.

Peter Parker was neither; she just lacked an appropriate script.

“What happened to _you_?” he asked. Deflecting, a clumsy, childish image of Tony’s tactics in speech.

“Fucked up my knee,” Natasha answered. She watched the lenses in his mask adjust as his eyes jumped to the joint, then back to her face.

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

The innocence of the question was blindsiding, and the only thing that prompted her to hesitate.

She could take him down in ten seconds, even now. Strength only got you so far, and his every motion was an example of the gaps in skill.

“Yes.” Her hands became fists, to stop her fingers shaking; something bilious and icy twisted in her stomach. “It’s… pretty painful. How are you…” she waved a hand, trying to phrase it appropriately, “doing?”

“I think I broke some ribs,” Peter mumbled. “I got… uh, electrocuted? Just a little? That- that, um, was what I was screaming about. But I’m okay now, I think. Except for, um, my bones. And shoulder. Which really hurts.”

 _I’m okay._ Nothing near a mirror image; just vague, slight similarities, reflections of the same platonic ideal.

“I shouldn’t do it while you’re standing,” Natasha explained. “Do you think you could help with my knee if I talked you through it? You reduce my joint, I reduce yours?”

“Um…” Peter seemed doubtful, and Natasha was jolted by the realisation that she’d over-extended her reach. “I-I’m not good with gross stuff. Do you like hot cocoa?”

“Why does it matter if I like cocoa?”

Ten minutes later, she was maneuvering into one of Happy Hogan’s inconspicuous cars, with more care than she would have normally taken. Happy (who was currently Peter’s babysitter, when had that happened?) was a godsend.

Spider-Man had managed to get out of his suit and into sweatpants, and was slumped in the back seat, shirtless and dejected. He looked worse without the costume, a bruise purpling across one side of his face, rough-edged wounds in delicate flesh, everywhere. There was a dark, inflamed patch on his shoulder, where the skin was beginning to peel.; an electric entry wound, which would make it harder to put back into place. His eyes were wet.

Natasha bit back the instinct to chastise; to pull the good arm away from the wounded one. The privacy screen was up. This was a private moment.

“You ready?” she asked. Peter nodded, doe-eyed and terrified. “I need you to relax, otherwise  this won't work.”

She grasped his arm at the bent elbow and wrist, and eased it upward, until it formed a perfect right angle with his body, limp hand facing forward. He hissed through his teeth, eyes screwed shut.

Natasha had never done this delicately, before.

She rotated his arm, angling his hand upwards, and pressed it inwards until it crunched back into place. Peter stifled a scream, tears building in his eyes and spilling down his cheeks.

“It's over,” Natasha raised an eyebrow and swallowed the urge to protest, to say something mocking. She just observed the luxury of it. “You did good.”

“You okay back there?” Happy called, lowering the screen.

“Could you just…” Peter let his head fall back against the armrest. “Take me home? Please? Don’t tell Tony.”

Natasha backed him up with a stony glare in the rear-view mirror.

She grit her teeth as the car started, made it visible.

There was no reason for her _not_ to go back to the apartment; nothing but the stinging muscle memory of fear, obsolete instincts of self-protection.

Her arm around Peter’s slender shoulders for support, careful to avoid jostling the freshly-reduced one, Natasha made it to the rickety elevator. She wondered if this was some form of self-flagellation. The act of flinging herself out of her comfort zone was painful enough to feel like it.

“I don’t like Tony’s people much,” Peter said, just before they reached his floor. He’d begun to sag against her for stability, to go quiet.  “They don’t like… y’know. The mask. The first time  I went there, I was unconscious, and I woke up without it.” Quietly, he bared even _more_. “It was scary.”

“That sucks,” Natasha answered. She was gathering information on reflex, taking in the scratched linoleum and peeling paint. She _hurt_ , everywhere, and was struggling to decide how much to acknowledge it.

Actually getting through the door brought forth another set of distractions. Well-worn furniture and the smell of spices.

There was a woman on the couch, peering at the television. One hand was twisting a lock of her hair, nervous.

“Peter? Are you okay?”  She was suddenly a surge of movement, close to Spider-Man, and therefore close to Natasha.

For the briefest second, Natasha snapped into a paradigm, and then she assessed. Peter almost dropping her in the rush to move closer, the look on the woman’s face, her age, the gentle trail of her fingers past the perimeter of Peter’s budding black eye. That was not how one looked upon broken property.

“Oh,” the woman said, when her attention finally shifted. “You brought a friend.”

“May,” Peter said, helping Natasha to the couch. “Have you ever like… re-located a knee before?”

It was too pleasant. That was the thing. It was the kind of place she'd construct to lull someone into a false sense of security. The kind of place she’d _only_ seen constructed for that purpose.

“I could do it if someone talked me through it,” May said. “Probably.” She turned to Natasha. “Should I address you as Black Widow, or…?”  

“Natasha is fine.” She sounded convincingly injured, demonstrating.

She could rationalise the behaviour in the terms of social learning; making it gaudy and blatant and almost, almost avoiding the expectation of punishment. She was teaching. That was all.

May nodded, then her footsteps tracked behind the divider wall and into the kitchen. A gas burner _fwoomed_ to life, and something was poured into a metal pot.

She returned with a first aid kit, and a hospital-sized box of antiseptic wipes. Peter peeled off his shirt, wincing at the motion.

Natasha was just waiting for the curtain to be pulled back.

“Okay,” May stepped towards Natasha, fingers knit together. “How do I do this?”

The process was painful, but allowing it to hurt was worse.

May was wearing blue nitrile gloves. Her hands were warm, soft, and utterly invasive. There was so much _trust_ in an injury; the contact made Natasha's skin crawl. She instructed through gritted teeth.

She could have done it with a straight face, but she was being watched.

There was a smooth pop, and Natasha believed, momentarily, in a world that regressed to the mean. That some day, there would be retribution for this, and it would make the grinding feeling of her patella being pushed back into place seem like nothing.

After the barrage of bandages and sutures, after blood had been mopped away and slings fashioned, May made hot chocolate. With whipped cream and tiny marshmallows, in three obnoxiously colourful Avengers cups. Natasha watched her nervous smile, the lines around her eyes. She thought of distant fairy-tales; witches and gingerbread.

Eventually, the anxiety began to subside. The void it left was filled with vague unease and sugar-shock; as if the warm, creamy cocoa had eroded it away.

There was a limit to the duration of a fight-or-flight response; the tail end of that curve was where cognition was supposed to kick in. This time, it didn’t.

“Hey.” Peter poked her with the metal edge of a small tube, setting down his mug to do so. Whipped cream clung to the sparse hairs above his lip. “Do you want this?”

Natasha eyed the tube. It was unopened.

“What is it?”

“Antibiotic numbing gel stuff,” Peter said, half-mumbling. He’d been slowly growing sluggish over time; from what Natasha understood, he did the bulk of his healing while sleeping, and the beating was starting to catch up to him. “Tony got it for me, but it has neomycin in it, so I can’t use it. Neomycin kinda makes me die.”

In that moment, Natasha just shrugged. She didn’t ask why he’d kept it. Spider-Man was _bizarrely_ open; he approached friendship with the carelessness he approached everything else, and she didn’t want to know the details.

She wondered how Tony kept him in line. How repulsed she’d be, if she knew.

She took the tube anyway.  

Hours later, in the unwatched silence of her own room, she unscrewed the cap and allowed the clear, cold contents to suck the sensation out of her wounds.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on my new fic tumblr [here!](http://na-no-why-mo.tumblr.com)


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